excerpt: “Shored Up” delivers a sobering examination of the threat rising sea levels pose to coastal cities and the economic factors that encourage doubters to keep their heads firmly buried in fast-disappearing sand. Utilizing footage captured in the wake of 2012?s Superstorm Sandy, the pic marks a sturdy feature-length debut for documentarian Ben Kalina, who eschews hysteria, preachiness and self-importance in favor of calm, persuasive scientific arguments. Accessible result lacks a flashy theatrical hook, but should connect with eco-conscious viewers in ancillary outlets and has already earned smallscreen exposure via DirecTV’s Something to Talk About docu series
A Beautiful Look at How Seaboards are Destroyed in Shored Up
By Daphne Howland Wednesday, Nov 27 2013
In Shored Up, director Ben Kalina has provided a sort of Occupy Wall Street: Beach Edition.
This is a sober look at how seaboards are vulnerable to a rise in ocean levels, made worse by storms and massively worse by massive storms. Our seemingly innate desire to hang on to disappearing sand, which is essentially what our barrier islands are, is beautifully illustrated by the film's cinematography and historical footage.
Kalina has explored what he calls the "intersection of science, culture, and the environment" before, and started this documentary about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' beach replenishment project along the New Jersey shore before Sandy shoved civilization around and set this story in sharp relief.
He acknowledges the inspiration of John McPhee's book The Control of Nature, which also describes the corps's Herculean task of taming the Mississippi River delta for development — and nature's tenacity in making that task Sisyphean instead.
Depending on who's talking (and Kalina talks to scientists, politicians, and everyone), beach replenishment is either prudent, unwise, or futile.
Kalina shows North Carolina politicians outlawing the consideration of sea level rise data in policymaking, a move to undo that state's long-standing protections against New Jersey–style development.
And he shows that the benefits of insurance, tax policies, and replenishment itself are reaped by the owners of multimillion-dollar summer houses while regular people in modest year-round communities are left to pick out framed photos of their loved ones from the rubble of their homes.
The documentary “Drawing Dead—The Highs And Lows Of Online Poker” is set to make its debut next month. The film, which is centered on the world of online poker, is Slated to air on Thursday, October 10 on DirecTV.
In the aftermath of Black Friday, the film follows a pair of dedicated online players: Dusty Schmidt, a well-known online poker multi-millionaire known as “Leatherass,” and Michael Korpi Jr., described as a one-time athlete and musician who cites online poker and a gambling addiction as reasons for a life derailed.
Covering the seven-year fight against the project, four hundred eighty hours of footage of people, street scenes, rallies, hearings, and more demolition than construction, was boiled down on the basis of “the emotion of the scene"...
At first glance, the title Battle for Brooklyn suggests a gang war raging on the streets of the Dodgers’ former habitat, the sort of hyper-violent slice of New Yorksploitation that...
Following community members who stand up against the flashy new development, the film emerges as a great work of advocacy journalism. It amasses maps, interviews, archival footage, voiceovers, renderings, and still photographs to...
Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's intimate, explosive documentary "Battle For Brooklyn" chronicles the David-vs.-Goliath fight that the couple, Daniel Goldstein and Shabnam Merchant, waged against what they'd call...
The 2011 Oscar documentaries short list is in, and the good news is that Battle for Brooklyn -- snubbed earlier this year by many major film festivals -- is on that list. The Occupy movement has made Battle for...
"Battle for Brooklyn"teaches about tenacity, access and, most of all, endurance. Co-directors Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley spent eight years chronicling a sorry American saga: the fight between residents and developers over...
The well-assembled documentary "Battle for Brooklyn" follows one man's tenacious and complicated fight to preserve his neighborhood from a questionable invoking of eminent...
In Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's "Battle for Brooklyn," the subject is the Atlantic Yards development project, in which the New Jersey Nets, with the help of co-owner Jay-Z, would get a new home in downtown Brooklyn...
Early in the new documentary Battle for Brooklyn, Senator Chuck Schumer appears at a rally in support of the proposed Atlantic Yards stadium and housing development. “What really...
When Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards project was announced some seven years ago, its boosters — who included Mayor Michael Bloomberg, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer and Borough President Marty Markowitz — touted the scheme's...
Nothing propels a documentary like injustice, and Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's infuriating chronicle of an outer-borough David-versus-Goliath saga plays like a marathon of inequity. For years, the filmmakers recorded the...
Jennifer Steinman's amazing documentary, 'Desert Runners' reveals just how intense and demanding the 4Deserts challenge is, so it was only natural that I sat down with her to discuss how she went about doing it and just how tough the challenge was as filmmakers.
Jennifer Steinman boldly ventures into the harsh and gruelling world of extreme distance running as she explores just what it takes to compete in the 4Desert Ultramarathon: a race that challenges competitors to trek across the Atacama, Gobi, Sahara and Antarctica deserts. By the end of the documentary you'll be left emotionally and physically exhausted.
The power, intensity and drama of endurance eventing is impressively brought into focus in Jennifer Steinman’s documentary Desert Runners, which, while it may dwell on the spectacle of the event and the locations for a series of brutal races more importantly focuses on the simple truth that the runners simply do it for themselves…they may be battling a harsh environment, but the biggest battle is against themselves.
I can barely run a mile so I’ve never considered partaking in an organised run. I’m no Mo Farah and couldn’t even contemplate a half marathon. Mention a full marathon and I’d probably pass out.
Inspiringly though, there are those brave enough to surpass the traditional marathons, pushing their bodies to exhaustion and over the limit to the point that they ask: ‘What am I doing here?’. Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Steinman and producers Yael Melamede and Diana Iles Parker have documented each step taken by four ultramarathon runners in this new film Desert Runners.
It never fails to amaze me how few of the people who love cinema love documentaries. Considering how much ‘reality’ TV dominates the television schedule it seems a shame that more people don’t support ‘reality’ cinema. Maybe that’s the reason though; people are saturated with reality and want Michael Bay endorsed nonsense on the big screen. Whatever the reason, it is a real shame as I have just finished watching one of my favourite films of the year so far – a documentary about four people undertaking a ‘grand slam’ in desert running.
Charting the successes and failures of four marathon runners, Jennifer Steinman’s documentary follows its subjects over the space of a year as they attempt to complete the 4 Deserts Grand Slam.
head of the start of the Edinburgh International Film Festival which takes place from the 19-30 June, I was lucky enough to be allowed a sneak preview of one of the films that will celebrate its world premiere at the 2013 festival.
It’s so damn hot,” laments Will Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy as he ruefully chugs a pint and a half of the white stuff in Anchorman.
We can only imagine what it was like for the equally heat-addled folk featured in new documentary Desert Runners. The film follows four non-professional athletes as they attempt the four hardest ultra-marathons on the planet: in the Atacama, Gobi and Sahara deserts, and in Antarctica.
Desert Runners is about running, but it is also about so much more—it’s an exploration into the perceived limitations that people place upon themselves, and the mindset necessary for some people to complete ‘impossible’ challenges”
Thymaya Payne's "Stolen Seas" is a documentary of such ambitious scope that you might need a remote control and a notebook to keep up with it. The film chronicles the hijacking of the CEC Future, a Danish ship traveling...
If moral ambiguity is the heart of piracy, then perhaps it makes sense that the most interesting person in the new pirate documentary Stolen Seasdoesn’t really consider himself a pirate...
A documentary that yearns to be an adventure movie, “Stolen Seas” can’t resist drowning its invaluable insights in thundering, drum-heavy music and flashing visuals. Magnificent in its thoroughness and nuance, this dense, multifaceted study of...
Thymaya Payne's documentary about piracy in Somalia is the latest film set to air in the DirecTV documentary series "Something to Talk About." The film will air on DirecTV's exclusive Audience Network on Saturday...
'If the state can't stop 12 guys in a boat, how powerful is it?" asks Matthew Raffety in, Thymaya Payne's investigation into the causes and reality of piracy near Somalia.
An admirably balanced, wide-ranging look at the phenomenon of Somali high-seas piracy, Thymaya Payne’s doc presents these modern-day buccaneers as players in a vast global economic system. Drawing on an acute historical...
The film is structured around the travails of one hijacked Danish vessel, which was held for months while shipping company executives and Somali pirates negotiated a settlement. As this tale unfolds, the film digs into some of the underlying...
Director Thymaya Payne reveals in the riveting "Stolen Seas" a dense, sometimes dangerous 90-minute immersion in a world where lawlessness applies to all sides and, shockingly, international shipping companies would rather pay the...
A remarkable portrait of civility and history, Saltzman recounts a series of significant events in the south during the civil rights era while attempting a personal reconciliation. The series of interviews between him and Delay...
The smile on Byron (Delay) De La Beckwith’s face never falters, even when he’s admitting to his ongoing loyalty to the Ku Klux Klan, brandishing his handgun, discussing his father’s imprisonment for the murder of civil rights leader...
Toronto filmmaker Paul Saltzman renews acquaintance with Ku Klux Klan member Byron (Delay) De La Beckwith in The Last White Knight: Is Reconciliation Possible?
What’s the proper response to evil? Should you just denounce someone who has done terrible things? Or should you try to figure out what makes them tick—and in the process, find out more about them and possibly change their minds and...
What is a giant multinational capable of doing to protect its brand, and how can its actions block public awareness and free expression? Those were the central questions raised in the Washington premier of Fredrik Gertten’s film...
Fredrik Gertten’s sobering and insightful Big Boys Gone Bananas!*should be compulsory viewing for any wannabe documentary filmmaker embarking on their investigative opus without a fear in the world. His film follows the...
Targeted by the corporate lawyers from a global food conglomerate, Swedish director Fredrik Gertten adopts a brilliant judo defence: recording the entire process in the course of this gripping – at times positively Orwellian...
In 2009, Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten was preparing to take his doc ‘Bananas!’ to the Los Angeles Film Festival when the film’s subject, Dole Foods (a big shot in bananas), began a campaign to counter claims made in the film. Now, Gertten...
In 2009, Swedish documentary filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s “Bananas!*” was just one of more than a dozen nonfiction competition entries in the Los Angeles Film Festival — the story of a (successful) lawsuit that a dozen Nicaraguan plant...
Fredrik Gertten's delight at being invited to premiere a film at the 2009 Los Angeles Film Festival was short-lived. The Swedish documentarian's "Bananas!*," chronicling a legal fight by Nicaraguan workers against...
A David-and Goliath story that delves into corporate scare tactics, legal effrontery, brand protection, media manipulation, online propagandizing and craven behavior.
What is shaping up as a losing proposition for Gertten is turned around only because Swedish parliamentarians on both sides of the aisle are so outraged by an American company’s attempt to quash a Swedish film that they take...
In September 1965, weeks after "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" hit the charts, the Rolling Stones landed in Dublin to play four manic gigs in two days. The band's manager, Andrew Loog Oldham...
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction had just topped the charts and the band were on the cusp of global fame. Screaming teenagers pursued them everywhere. Off stage, they still had the cocky, brittle confidence of sixth-formers on a school...
HBO’s “Crossfire Hurricane” isn’t the only new documentary to offer a revealing glimpse into the half-century career of the Rolling Stones. Also just out is “Charlie Is My Darling,” which follows the band on a short 1965 tour of...
The Rolling Stones have long been magnets for filmmakers. Not just any filmmakers, mind you -- we’re talking about some of the greatest the world has ever seen: Jean-Luc Godard ("Sympathy For The Devil"), Martin Scorsese...
Believe it or not, just like most young bands, there was a time early on in the ’60s when The Rolling Stones didn’t know how long their rock star careers would last. “We’ll probably be around for a year, or a year and a half”
There's inevitable brashness and a well-intentioned pomposity to the members of the Rolling Stones throughout Charlie Is My Darling, Mick Gochanour's thrilling document of the...
It's easy to forget how shocking the Stones were in 1965. The previously unreleased documentary Charlie Is My Darling is a riveting reminder of when they were a generational lightning rod.
It may surprise some that the title of the film singles out drummer Charlie as the band’s darling. But his bone-dry humor gives the movie a wily allure. Jagger speaks most directly of the cultural changes his generation represents...
We see the scrappy musicians being chased by hysterical fans, goofing off, inelegantly adjusting personas in interviews and casually composing songs (check out the clip of Jagger and Richards working through...
There was little to pity about the Rolling Stones in September of 1965. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was outselling the Beatles, with the band on the cusp of mega-stardom and half-amazed to be so. On stage, they still...
The Rolling Stones have turned 50. (As a collective entity, of course. The individual members are mostly basking in their late 60s and early 70s.) I don’t think it takes anything away from that feat of longevity — though it may annoy some fans...
Peter Whitehead's never-released 1965 film renders a sharply focused black-and-white snapshot of the Rolling Stones rapidly approaching superstardom after the release of "Satisfaction."
